Family Research Council Fellow: Society Should ‘Punish’ and ‘Shame’ Pre-Marital Sex

Pat Fagan, a senior fellow with the anti-gay, largely religious Family Research Council, recently wrote a scathing condemnation of marriage equality in which he also belittles anyone who has sex before marriage.

Trust me. I’m Christian.

In light of the Supreme Court’s upcoming cases on DOMA and Proposition 8, Fagan wrote that the Supreme Court already “wounded marriage” 41 years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the decision that ruled states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to unmarried individuals:

The Court played God by redefining the purpose of sexuality. In the process it unleashed sex’s destructive power detached from marriage. The Court could see rights to contraceptives in the “shadow” of the Constitution but could not see what a blind man could: the right of every child to married parents.

Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.

On Monday, Fagan appeared on the right-wing radio show “Washington Watch” with FRC president Tony Perkins to talk about his article. There, he advocated for some pretty intense ways to keep unmarried people from having sex:

… what the Supreme Court essentially said is single people have the right to engage in sexual intercourse. Well, societies have always forbidden that, there were laws against it. Now sure, single people are inclined to push the fences and jump over them, particularly if they are in love with each other and going onto marriage, but they always knew they were doing wrong…

…

… Society never gave young people that right, functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.

I guess if we just got everyone to commit to abstinence until marriage, all the world’s problems would go away! But really, this is all rhetoric we’ve heard before, and it’s clearly not going to get us anywhere. It’s not like pre-marital sex didn’t exist or rarely existed before the Court’s decision and, if anything, access to contraception prevents abortions. Fagan should be thanking for the Court for that, not blaming them for their decision.